Candidates from across the North Shore’s waterfront ridings are hoping their positions on oil and gas projects and climate change policies can help woo in undecideds.
The B.C. Green Party candidate running in West Vancouver Sea to Sky says, if elected, it will be his job to scrap the province’s approval of the Woodfibre LNG plant on Howe Sound.
Dana Taylor said its approval granted by the province last year fell far short of international standards, especially when it comes to the safe shipping of liquefied natural gas.
“I would need to check the authority to do so but suspension of the licence would be the starting point,” he said. “How it got by without it, is still a puzzle to me.”
The Green Party remains equally opposed to Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, although Taylor was not clear if that project could be stopped.
“The underlying issue to it all is that the current government is focused on supporting an oil and gas industry to (our) detriment and ignoring other options,” he said.
When it comes to combating climate change, Taylor pointed to his party’s plans to raise the carbon tax by $10 per tonne, per year up to $70 per tonne as a means to “to meet and essentially beat the national targets by 2020,” he said.
“The point is to account for the real costs of this and the impact it has on the environment,” he said, although he could not say how that would impact a typical household. “Yes we recognize there is a cost to it. We think we can mitigate that cost by taking certain actions.”
Beyond that, Taylor said his party would also start applying the carbon tax to “fugitive” emissions that are not currently covered by the tax like burning forest slash, and promote low-carbon consumer choices like higher efficiency in construction standards and encourage more wind, solar, tidal and geothermal energy.
On LNG and Woodfibre’s application, which was approved by the province last year, North Vancouver-Seymour NDP candidate Michael Charrois was less committal about whether the project should proceed, though he did call LNG Christy Clark’s “biggest broken promise” of the last election.
For the NDP to support LNG projects, they must meet a made-in-B.C. environmental approval, provide jobs and training for local workers, provide a “fair return” to British Columbians, and the project must have full partnership with First Nations, which has not yet been the case with Woodfibre, Charrois noted.
Charrois was unequivocal that the minimal construction jobs and danger of an oil spill made Trans Mountain not worth the risk.
“Perhaps Kinder Morgan may have made sense in the 1950s,” he said. “It’s dangerous to have a seven-fold increase in tanker traffic through an area of high urban density… . “It does not have full partnership or buy-in from the Tsleil-Waututh, who are against it, and we stand with local First Nations in opposition to this Kinder Morgan pipeline.
“We will do everything in our toolbox to make sure that project does not go forward.”
For combatting climate change, Charrois pointed to his party’s PowerBC platform plank, which includes energy retrofits to public buildings like schools and hospitals, upgrades to existing energy infrastructure (negating the need to build the Site C dam), encouraging wind, solar and geothermal energy production and increasing the carbon tax in keeping with the federal government’s new carbon pricing agreement.
Those would mean higher costs, Charrois said, but under the NDP’s plan, 80 per cent of families will receive a climate action rebate cheque.
West Vancouver-Sea to Sky Liberal incumbent Jordan Sturdy acknowledged Woodfibre’s LNG plant is a big issue in certain parts of his riding but said the project has been thoroughly vetted by the province, the federal government and the Squamish Nation.
“I have been following the environmental assessment process for the last four years and ultimately all three environmental assessments concluded the impacts to the Sound and to the ecosystem were minimal and mitigable,” he said.
On Kinder Morgan, Sturdy said it is the federal government’s decision to make. His government granted the project an environmental certificate in January but, Sturdy said, that only creates more stringent conditions for the pipeline already approved.
As for climate change, Liberals have no plans to up the carbon tax unless other Canadian provinces are doing the same.
“We are going to go (through) this together, in many respects. We are part of a pan-Canadian framework. We have committed to a revenue neutral approach to carbon taxes, protection of people who are the most vulnerable of our society as well as considering the impacts to our energy-intensive and trade-exposed industries,” he said, noting B.C. lost cement production to jurisdictions where there are no carbon taxes at all.
Also of note in the Liberals’ climate change strategy are investments in reforestation in areas impacted by forest fires and the pine beetle, rebates for the purchase of electric vehicles, a promise to reach 100 per cent renewable energy in places currently relying on fossil fuels, and continued support of the province’s innovative clean energy fund to support the clean tech industry.
